Max Power
Kevin Bruner on Telltale's approach to licensing, next-gen consoles and episodic gaming.
In the second part of our interview with Telltale's Kevin Bruner, conducted at this year's Nordic Game conference, he discusses the changes that are happening to games and the way they're delivered. To read part one, click here.
You mentioned earlier that you think games have gotten too big. Can you explain why that is?Kevin Bruner: I think the industry is crafting one type of content and that's the 1000 page novel. If you went into a bookstore and every book was a 1000 page novel - not everyone wants that.
It's breaking out of that now; we've gone through five or six years of the 50 hour FPS. With the Wii and the handhelds and casual gaming, we're seeing a lot of consumers who want something different.
In traditional gaming I've always said the worst job is the penultimate level designer. You know that 70 per cent of the people who play the game are never going to get there, as most people don't finish games. The people that do get there are going to be pushing for the end of the game, they want to see the last level so they fly though it.
You could argue that if you look at the charts, many of the big selling games, titles like Spider-Man, are ones that have big franchises, big teams and big budgets attached. So is that what people want?I think what people want are the franchises and the properties. People want to interact with the Spider-Man and the Superman universes. Those are very action orientated characters, but there are a lot of franchises which don't make sense in the videogame space - where for example you turn into James Bond: Mass Murderer, or you make Star Wars games about hacking and blowing stuff up.
We think those games sell well, despite not being very good games, because people really want to interact with those characters and experience a little bit more than what they got out of the movie.
Our games are all very story driven, they're not action games at all. We think that that kind of treatment is what people would respond more favourably to if they were offered it.
Alongside episodic gaming it's a great way to introduce people to the format cheaply and also to bring a number of new properties into the market that aren't appropriate for action games.
Spider-Man is a big action game but you're not going to go around killing everyone in the CSI games that we make. We're really focused on not just episodic gaming but also licensed games, Bone, Sam and Max, CSI. Some of the new stuff we'll announce is licensed too - we've never actually done an original game.
So what approach do you take to licences?We really believe that a lot of licences have just had horrible treatment. You take an FPS engine and slap whatever you've got into it and crank it out for four platforms. We're really committed to trying to change that, to get real quality from licences and be more faithful.
Are you sticking with developing for PC only?The studio is currently working on Wii and 360 development but we haven't announced anything yet.
Why not PlayStation 3?We're looking at PlayStation 3 as well; we're working with different partners for different consoles at the minute and we just haven't found the right partner for PS3 yet. It's more of an opportunistic thing.
We would love to do PS3 and PSP and DS. Our games are relatively simple, they're not technical tour de forces; we can run run pretty much anywhere. We're a small studio so finding the right partners is important.
Going back to the issue of episodic content - do you think episodic games will compete successfully against traditional, big budget games? Perhaps in a similar way to how TV shows like Lost compete with blockbuster movies?Absolutely. They're different experiences. If you think how you feel when you watch a big blockbuster movie as opposed to how you feel watching three years worth of Lost, they're totally different experiences.
They can definitely live together. At the moment Telltale does a lot of episodic games but that doesn't mean that we couldn't do a big feature in the future. We could take Sam and Max and make one great big game from that.
They're different formats and you just have different expectations of how you want to play them. No one is really doing episodic the way we're doing it at the moment; I think a lot of things which are considered as episodic are just chopped up big games.
So there hasn't been a lot of opportunity for people to tell the difference between the feature and the episode format. But if we tried to take a single episode of Sam and Max and stretched it out into a big game it would feel like a TV show that had been stretched out into a movie.
If we tried to tell a huge epic story in the timespan that we do for an episode it would feel wrong as well. I don't think there are any other episodic games that have quite differentiated themselves from what their larger game context would be.
But why make people wait for new episodes when there seems to be a growing trend towards content on demand, all in one go - box sets and so on?Again it maps really well to TV where there are a lot of different ways in which you can consume content. You can jump straight in at the beginning and download it there and then, go straight on the Internet and talk to your friends about it, you can come and download it at anytime you want.
We partnered with Gametap for Sam and Max which is a subscription service so you can download it with a whole bunch of other games, or you can do the box set at the end of the season if you want to sit down and play it from beginning to end - kind of like you'd watch a DVD box set.
Episodic content gives you a lot of options on how you want to consume the game. As opposed to, say, Halo, where you go buy it and you spend your three weeks getting to the end of it and then you're done. You have one consumption option whereas with episodic gaming you have a lot of options - and people seem to like choice.
Kevin Bruner is chief technology officer at Telltale Games. Interview by Ellie Gibson.